In conventional winding devices, such as have been described, for example, in DE-OS No. 25 44 828 and in DE-GM No. 79 12 019, the middle of the cable to be wound is fastened to an intermediate partition on a cable drum so that, in operation, the cable is fed into or pulled out of the device using two feed and discharge guides. These devices suffer the drawback that they are disposed between the device (appliance) attached to the cable and a plug on the end of the cable, and this arrangement can be quite inconvenient, e.g., in a hair dryer which is manipulated manually.
Given a certain length of cable to be wound, the aforementioned prior art devices, i.e., those including two feed and discharge guides, have the advantage that, from the beginning, only half of the cable length need be fed into each of the two winding chambers on each side of a separating partition. However, this arrangement does not avoid the problem which can occur during winding of a cable, especially a flat cable, resulting from the fact the windings or turns of the cable tend to lie one directly over the other and to thus form a narrow, but radially thick, coil on the drum. Such a thick coil can cause jamming of the cable drum in the housing, before a winding chamber has been filled over its entire breadth (axial width). Such jamming during winding of the cable has resulted in the provision of winding chambers of considerable volume, with a suitably large diameter. This can be cumbersome and disadvantageous particularly where, e.g., the cable winder, or an apparatus including the cable winder, must be handled manually. The aforementioned problem presented by an abnormally narrow build-up of the winding turns is a particular drawback when the cable is attached by one end to the cable drum, so that the entire length of cable to be wound is drawn in and pulled out using a single feed and discharge guide.